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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

You know, before we had interceptor missiles that were tolerably good against ballistic missiles, pretty much the exact same argument was made by experts like Edward Teller for why space based lasers and/or particle beams were essential to intercept ballistic missiles.

Not saying its necessarily wrong now, but it was definitely very expensively wrong the last time.

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I am been fascinated by Edward Teller and the x-ray laser. It strikes me as a case of a golden hammer [0]. Here he had an incredible tool: a thermonuclear weapon. It can destroy a silo, a fleet of ships, or a city. What else can we do with it [1]? Maybe for the best it didn’t work out.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur

The human genome project cost 3 billion dollars to sequence the first genome(s) (with one draft costing about 300 million), you can now have your genome sequenced for less than $1000.

Yes there are differences, but science and technology have moved on substantially. Just because it was wrong the last time does not mean it is going to be wrong this time.

> The human genome project cost 3 billion dollars to sequence the first genome(s)

Yeah, but (1) that’s orders of magnitude less than SDI, and (2) it actually did the thing.

"SDI failed" doesn't actually have a ton of evidence.

If I built something like SDI, and I put it in HOE, the next thing I'd do is tell everyone else that it didn't work.

We still don't know the content of a few shuttle launches, as well as many ULA launches.

I think SDI was completed and functions.

Umm, it's pretty trivial for amateurs to track space objects either in Earth orbit. For SDI to work, both the number and size of the systems would be quite large. And they would need to be replaced when they either fail or run out of station-keeping propellent. So no, there's no evidence for a "hidden" SDI that actually works.

It was hideously expensive to develop interceptor missiles too though.

(But yes, SDI had almost no chance of working at the time.)

Isn't that what "Star Wars" was?

Yes, that's what I am referring to.

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